Asked for an assessment of NFL officiating this season, a league spokesman said, “Same as it normally is. Outstanding, not perfect. That’s the nature of sports.”
The nature of sports can be difficult to stomach … for coaches with jobs on the line; for players with playoff bonuses at stake; for fans heavily invested, psychologically and financially, in their teams.
Consider Week 2 when referee Ed Hochuli blew his whistle as Denver Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler lost his grip while moving his arm backward before a likely late-fourth-quarter pass. The ball slipped loose, a San Diego Chargers linebacker fell on it and it appeared a key AFC West road victory had been secured.
Wrong. Hochuli’s whistle indicating an incomplete pass changed everything. The call meant the play was not reviewable, and Denver retained possession and used the precious waning seconds to score a deciding touchdown and two-point conversion. A San Diego radio station repeated throughout the season a desperate caller asking a haunting question: “We won! But we lost?”
It took until the final week of the season for San Diego to edge Denver for the AFC West title and playoff spot and let Hochuli off the hook.
“Come on,” said Barry Mano, president of the National Association of Sports Officials. “Lots of decisions were made and lots of tackles were missed after that call. What should be noted about that call is that, yes, Ed screwed up, and he admitted it. Then he and his crew went back at it and had an outstanding season, just like a team coming off a defeat. You saw the mettle of the man after that call. Nobody went hiding under a bushel basket, and the rest of his crew’s season showed you that.”
Hochuli, an attorney, spent the days after the Denver-San Diego game responding with apologies to hundreds of e-mails sent to his Phoenix law office, but his crew wound up grading so well for the next 15 weeks it earned a cherished playoff assignment, working the Baltimore-Miami contest.
It did so, however, as other crews navigated a season dotted by controversial calls.
In early November, a video replay on an NBC Sunday night telecast appeared to show New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning had crossed the line of scrimmage before completing a critical third-down pass for a first down inside the five-yard line. That was the call on the field. But a replay convinced officials Manning’s heel was behind the line of scrimmage when he released the ball, setting up a touchdown in what would be a five-point victory at NFC East rival Philadelphia.
The Eagles needed a last-week victory to qualify for the postseason.
“We do everything we can for our officials to ensure mistakes are at a minimum,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said. “There are 40,000 plays in a year. There are going to be questionable calls, but many times those questionable calls are correct.”
Atlanta Falcons President Rich McKay, co-chair of the NFL’s competition committee, said “the quality of officiating in our league was very good this year. What happens is everyone’s attention goes to a few plays that were disputed. I don’t think that’s fair to the officials. It’s a very difficult game to officiate.”
McKay said the public scrutinizes close calls more than ever, thanks to repeated, multi-angle replays and high-definition televisions. The result, he says, is that officials are held to an “unreasonable standard” in the fast-moving game.
The NFL’s sensitivity to officiating questions is real. Aiello declined to make vice president of officiating Mike Pereira available for an interview with the Los Angeles Times about the 2008 season. Pereira, who addresses difficult calls or interesting plays weekly during the season on NFL Network, will retire after the 2009 season to return home to California. The league said that decision is entirely personal.
“There were some high-profile calls this year that might’ve made people think there’s something wrong with our officials,” McKay said. “There’s not.”
Late in the season, officials reviewed a last-minute, fourth-quarter catch by Pittsburgh’s Santonio Holmes after ruling on the field that he was down at the one. That would have set up a tough fourth-down decision for Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, whose team trailed the Baltimore Ravens by three. Following the replay review, referee Walt Coleman announced Holmes had scored a touchdown because he had both feet in the end zone with possession of the ball. But the feet don’t matter; the ball, in Holmes’ possession, had to be on or across the goal line, and multiple replays seemed inconclusive.
Nevertheless, Pittsburgh clinched the AFC North title with the victory.
“I thought we had a pretty superior performance given all the variables of the season,” Mano said. “There were not a lot of screw-ups. Believe me, we hate it when we screw up. No one feels worse than we do when it happens, and it may happen on a play that no one notices we have screwed up. We take great pride to get it right. Our character is not at issue.”
But some of the calls are, or the competition committee that McKay chairs with Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher wouldn’t be considering rule changes related to Hochuli’s incompletion call in the Denver-San Diego game and a missed call in the AFC playoffs by Terry McAulay’s crew — the same crew that will officiate the Super Bowl. In an AFC divisional playoff game between Baltimore and Tennessee, the officials failed to notice the play clock had expired before the Ravens had snapped the ball in a late-fourth-quarter series. A third-down completion on the play helped the Ravens beat Fisher’s top-seeded Titans, 13-10, and the coach called the mistake “unacceptable.”
A possible remedy under consideration is to move the play clock to a standardized, lower-sightline location, McKay said. But rule adjustments require the approval of 24 of the league’s 32 teams, never an easy task, according to McKay.
Meanwhile, the performance of officials will continue to be scrutinized. Mano said he’s secured Hochuli to speak in July in Tucson on a sports officials’ panel that will address a subject that is taboo to officials: judgment calls.
“The point in the old days is that we don’t talk about judgment calls,” Mano said. “Now, everything’s on the table. Everything’s being discussed and seen about what we do, so we’re going to talk about it, and Ed is happy to do it. Again, these guys are consummate professionals.”
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